Australia (New South Wales, North Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria)

Type locality: Australia

Map legend: - Region according to the TDWG standard, not a precise distribution map.

NOTE: TDWG regions are generated automatically from the text in the distribution field and not in every cases it works well. We are working on it.

Types

Holotype: ZMB 30101.

Comment

Adults of Pogona vitticeps are smaller towards the southern limit of the distribution of the species, the smallest animals occurring in the Big Desert in western Victoria. Females are not markedly smaller at sexual maturity than males, but males mature at a much smaller size. Data from P. barbata suggest that early male maturity in southern areas may occur also in that species. Relative growth and external morphology indicates that the Big Desert population is not taxonomically distinct from P. vitticeps. Factors causing the reduced size of animals in the population are unknown (WITTEN & COVENTRY 1990).

Trapp (2014) documented some of the color morphs available of this species.

Max. SVL: 25 cm, tail length: 30 cm (max. length: 60 cm).

Reproduction: High incubation temperatures of eggs reverse genotypic males (ZZ) to phenotypic females in P. vitticeps, which has genetic sex determination (GSD) with female heterogamety. Between 22° and 32°C, sex ratios did not differ significantly from 1:1, a response consistent with GSD. However, between 34° and 37°C, there was an increasing female bias, suggesting that temperature was overriding genotypic sex in some males (Quinn et al. 2007).

Diagnosis: in Badham 1976

Longevity: Müller (2014) reports an animal that lived for 19 years and 5 months in captivity.

Genomics: this is one of the species selected by the Genome 10K consortium for complete genome sequencing.